


Gates of Horn and Ivory

by estas_absentis



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Ambiguity, Angry Sex, But like horny pining, Dirty Talk, First War with Voldemort, Lucid Dreaming, M/M, Oneiromancy, Pining, Remus Lupin's Vast Self Loathing, Rough Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-08
Updated: 2019-05-08
Packaged: 2020-02-28 10:43:22
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,250
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18754831
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/estas_absentis/pseuds/estas_absentis
Summary: "When he was first learning to walk in dreams, Remus was careful"Remus finds Sirius in his dreamscape, things progress.





	Gates of Horn and Ivory

**Author's Note:**

> This one courtesy of The Witcher 3 for teaching me the term 'oneiromancy' and The Raven Cycle novels for making me think ceaselessly about sad boys dreaming. 
> 
> Find me [here on tumblr](https://majorkey.tumblr.com/) if that's your thing!

When he was first learning to walk in dreams, Remus was careful; covering the mirrors, locking doors, shuttering the windows against the spirits and psychopomps that would, if given the chance, inveigle their way into the wrecked shell of his unoccupied body. He’d been disappointed to learn, the first time, that even on that intangible plane his spirit-form was crisscrossed with scarring, the purple slash in his belly terrible with tooth-point keloids, their presence proof that the damage was somewhere deep in his very soul, terrible and inextricable.

 

Oneiromancy, as a practice, was not dissimilar in terms of reliability to other forms of divination: the things he glimpsed there were vague and impressionist, images and exchanges that he himself would later have to parse, searching for meaning in his scrawled, sleepy-handed notes like a soothsayer squinting at entrails. Still it helped - it was common knowledge in the Order that Death Eaters used the dream plane to communicate with one another, having practiced long and hard enough to breach the dreams of others, to talk without fear of the interception of letters or the tracking of the floo. It reasoned, Dumbledore had suggested, that it would therefore be useful to have an equivalent oneiromancer among their number - someone able to walk in the liminal space between waking and sleeping, to track down and monitor these clandestine communiqués.

 

Lily had point-blank refused, being at this point two months pregnant and increasingly given to waking in the night with nausea, heartburn - she was tired enough working during the day, without taking on added responsibilities while she slept. James would have offered, but his mind was not composed correctly - too square and rigid, matter-of-fact, black-and-white in its understanding of being and not-being. The others - the Prewetts, Fenwick, even Dearborn - had active assignments from which their attention could not be drawn. This had left Remus and Sirius as the two likeliest candidates (always the pair of them, a matched set, loose ends fraying in different directions). Given Sirius’ absolute incompetence with regards to occlumency, he too had eventually been discounted, the door to his mind too wide open to guard, his control over his thoughts and feelings too loose and (Remus suspected) their inky depths too dark for him not to simply get lost within, to drown.

 

Remus, whittled by twenty years of rigid self control, his mind a gnarled mass of repressed desires and smothered hurts, of impulses carefully ignored, had always been the most suitable candidate - likely Dumbledore had always intended him for this, but had, with his trademark passive-aggression, allowed them to imagine they had come to this conclusion themselves.

 

Slipping into the dreams was half meditation, half medication - a bitter tea first had to be brewed, its ingredients both commonplace and arcane. Remus took to producing huge batches of it in the great, tarnished copper tureen within which, in happier times, Sirius had whipped up the elaborate curries he’d learned to make in his teenage years at Mrs Potter’s elbow (better, she said, than James’ efforts - to his chagrin). The unpleasant, fennely smelling concoction would sit on a low heat on their clapped-out gas hob for hours, a vaguely green haze hovering in the air above it. Sirius complained that it gave him a headache, or else claimed, in a fantastically unkind impression of Fenwick’s vaguely sad post-hippie drone, that he, like, had a total contact high, _man_.

 

When the tea had been decanted - Remus preferred to ladle it into a delicate china cup, more for the look of the thing than for any magical purpose - the dreamer had to stir it, very carefully, with a fingertip, chanting an Old English spell. The deviation from the usual Latin was new to Remus, but it made a certain sense, tapping into the old magic of the land rather than assuming the more scholarly Latinate magic preferred by Wizarding academics since the Renaissance. Lily’s abandoned Masters’ thesis had been on the patriarchal repurposing of indigenous magic and the implications of standardising (and Westernising) magical practice - she had a lot to say about the gendered connotations of wandwork alone - and Remus always thought of her as he did this.

 

After this step was complete, Remus would drink it in one wincing gulp, like a tequila slammer, and then settle, fully clothed, on top of his bedsheets. The dream would creep in around him like a fog, the edges of his cramped bedroom blurring and shifting until he found himself suddenly standing, as if he’d been there all along, in his own personal dreamscape. It looked like his parents’ property on the edge of the Brecon Beacons, the clapped-out white walled cottage with its untended grassy fields and the darkening treeline where, in his childhood, Greyback had waited.

 

As Remus roamed the grounds, flickering images would appear, hazy and incorporeal, growing stronger and more substantial the more practiced he became. Through these means, he had already ascertained the location of Peter’s lost wallet (the gents’ bathroom at one of London’s seedier Wizarding dives) and predicted the chipping of Sirius’ front tooth, which had come a week later in one of the 2am Hogsmeade brawls for which he had lately become known. Sometimes objects appeared, startlingly new in the familiar surroundings, and Remus would have to work out exactly what they meant. This was his least favourite type of offering, requiring the most lateral thinking, and he would sit cross-legged in the long grass turning over whatever had appeared - a locket, a strip of gauzy black cloth, a long and curving talon - until he worked out what it signified, or frustration got the better of him, whichever (usually the latter) arrived first.

 

The first time he’d heard them, he’d been wandering the edge of the property, the boundary of the dreamscape like the membrane of a bubble, or else the curving glass of a snowglobe. At first it had seemed like the buzzing of bees, and he’d wondered if his mother’s hives were awake - living beings had never yet appeared on the homestead and Remus hadn’t entirely known what that would mean. As he’d continued along the perimeter it had become clear that he was hearing human voices - indistinct and fuzzy, like an international phonecall or the staticy, feedback sound of a fucked amp - and he’d realised with a thrill that he was close to accomplishing what he’d been charged to do. He’d been woken with a lurching plunge in his stomach moments later by Sirius coming home drunk and proceeding to make an ungodly clattering in the kitchen, humming a T Rex song under his breath, badly out of tune.

 

Since then he had spent considerable time scouting the edges of his dreamscape, refining his hearing like a singer learning to recognise pitch. Just last week he had been able to report back that he’d heard two distinct words (‘July’ and ‘dark’), and although without context these had been largely useless, he’d felt proud of his accomplishment and confident in his abilities, two sensations so unfamiliar as to be unsettling to his general equilibrium.

 

Perhaps this disconcerting assuredness, the deviation from his traditional neurosis, is the cause of this first carelessness: lying on his bed, the dream-fog creeping in, Remus is suddenly aware that his bedroom door is, in fact, ajar. Being halfway under he is in no position to get up and close it - the best he can do now is hope that the windows in the rest of the flat are secured as he is swallowed up and spat back out in the familiar front yard.

 

Everything _seems_ fine. A cursory jog around the tumbledown house reveals no new objects or apparitions, and Remus is just about to start his nightly circuit of the dream’s edge when he sees, fleetingly, a flash of movement in the copse of trees. Traditionally, he avoids this area, unsure as to what his subconscious would manifest at the site of such extreme past trauma, all large hands and sharp teeth,  but now he zeroes in on it. The movement had simply been the trees rocking, sussurating in the wind, swaying quite naturally. This would be fine, he thinks with a curdling of fear, were the air here not deadly still.

 

He thinks hard about his wand and an equivalent manifests in his clammy grip - everything feels so real and physical here, but he’s unsure as to what good dreamed magic would do against whatever has got into his head. Swallowing, he remembers the protocol to wake himself up, just in case (another chant and then a count - backwards from 10 - with his eyes screwed tightly shut) and heads, as he had in 1964, towards the treeline.

 

When he enters the forest, the light changes, warmed as it filters through the green leaves overhead, the rich browns of the earth and bark around him. Somehow this is more disconcerting in being so pleasant, and even as he walks he begins to murmur the chant under his breath, readying himself for a swift exit if something unfightable and terrible emerges from the clearing to which he’s heading, the one in which he _knows_ by some unexplainable internal logic that the intruding presence is waiting.

 

It is Sirius. Or rather - it wears Sirius’ face, and smiles in greeting in the most perfect imitation of Sirius’ artless insouciance, right down to the lone dimple in his left cheek and the tiny chip in his tooth.

 

“Alright”, it says.

 

“What are you?” Remus asks, suspicious of this figure, the lazy, elegant slant of its shoulders.

 

“Don’t you mean, who?”

 

“ _Who_ are you?”

 

“Is this like, one of the passphrase questions Moody’s got us learning? Ask me one of them, if you don’t think I’m _me_.” Even the exasperated boredom, the idea that these protocols are sort of beneath him, is so spot-on. Remus feels sick.

 

“What was the first gig we went to together?” he asks.

 

“Stubby Boardman’s solo show. It was shit so we got fucked on the house vodka and went to muggle London for chips. You were sick behind a phone box”. It has the nerve to _grin_.

 

“Why are you here?”

 

“We’ve been here before. The house, I mean - don’t you remember?”

 

The four of them had spent one week here the summer after fifth year. Remus always remembers it with some finality - the last time he’d been able to ignore how he felt for Sirius, the sun catching the brown highlights of his hair and getting caught in his stupidly long eyelashes, the last time he’d been able to monopolise Sirius’ summertime attentions: he’d moved in with James the year after that and Remus had returned to dragging behind, struggling to catch up with their in-jokes and remember-whens. Even now, with James married and Sirius sleeping in the next room, Remus still feels a little outside of it, a little ancillary.

 

Sirius looks at him, narrowing his grey eyes in a way that could be either cruel or simply speculative. “Ask me about last Tuesday”, he says.

 

“What was last Tuesday?”

 

“Don’t pretend you don’t know. There was, like, this moment, remember? When you came to shout at me for making my dinner -”

 

“- it was two in the bloody morning and I was _Dreaming_ -”

 

“- right. And I looked at you, remember, and you stopped talking and you shivered. I _saw_ you shiver.”

 

“And then you said…”

 

“And I said, why don’t you shut me up then, Remus. And I really thought you were going to. _Shit_ , I thought, for once in his bloody long-suffering life Remus Lupin is going to actually take something he wants. And then what did you do?”

 

“I went back to bed”

 

“You went back to bed. I _know_ you wanted me, and you went back to bed”.

 

They stare at each other in silence. None of this is anything Sirius would ever say, but it is exactly how he _would_ say it. He’s almost pathologically opposed to talking about his feelings (or indeed, those of others), save for the occasional small-hours, alcohol induced ramblings that see him telling James and Pete for the fifth time in a row just how much he _loves_ them, or gets started in on a story about Regulus, lump in his throat. On those nights nobody really knows what to say, scared of the way his demonstrative sadness can flash so quickly into anger, a drawbridge slamming shut once the inhabitants of the castle realise how vulnerable they are to attack.

 

“So what is this? Are you like, my subconscious?” Remus asks. It’s depressingly believable that Remus’ deepest, most secret thoughts and desires would appear wearing Sirius’ face - he can’t hide from that, here inside his own head.

 

“Not quite. I’m definitely _a_ Sirius” says Sirius, looking puzzled, as if he hadn’t considered the possibility that he might not be _the_ Sirius until now.

 

“I left the door open”

 

“You did. Maybe I walked out of his head into yours. If I concentrate I can feel what he’s feeling”

 

“And?”

 

It smiles nastily. It’s the smile that immediately precedes a bar fight, the one full of daggers. It says “Oh, he’s _very_ confused about you”, and Remus feels the hairs raise on his arms like a cornered cat.

 

Sirius takes a step towards him “You wouldn’t believe what’s in this head” he says, his voice low, like ragged nails raking across Remus’ back.

 

“No?” he asks, pleased that his voice still sounds somewhat level.

 

“Hmmm. No,” Sirius says, running his thumb absently over his bottom lip - a gesture Remus has seen, obsessed over, a hundred times - “he’s _angry_ at you”.

 

The way he says _angry_ sends a silvery chill down Remus’ spine. Sirius takes another step towards him - they’re hardly even a foot apart now. Remus swallows, his throat suddenly dry. The clearing seems very quiet, and he realises the trees have stopped. Nothing moves, the only sound his ragged breathing, suddenly deafening. Sirius surges forward again, hardly any space between their bodies. Remus can feel Sirius’ breath on his cheek. He reaches out one hand - it’s shaking - and touches the soft cotton of Sirius’ t shirt.

 

“You feel real,” he says, his voice wobbling. There’s nothing hazy or dreamlike about him. He feels dangerous, but only in the way Sirius himself feels dangerous, like he’s made of broken glass, one moment perfectly transparent, ready to cut you if you make one wrong move. Sirius smiles at him, feral, his eyes dark with wanting.

 

“I am real” he breathes.

 

“What does - does he -”

 

Sirius reaches his hand up to where Remus’ is still splayed on his chest. He grips Remus’ wrist, guides the hand, with some authority, down Sirius’ torso, skimming the jut of his ribcage, the smooth planes of his stomach, the curving ridge of his hipbones, until it rests over the unambiguous hardness in his jeans. He looks Remus in the eye, hand still over his, keeping it where it rests. Remus feels his index finger twitch with the effort of keeping it still.

 

“He wants this” he says.

 

“Thats - that’s why he’s angry?”

 

“Among other things” Sirius says, and leans in, his breath warm where his mouth hovers over Remus’ own. It’s so close it almost feels like they’re already kissing - until suddenly, Remus can control himself no longer, closes the gap between them - and they’re doing it for real.

 

Sirius’ mouth is both the same and different than Remus imagined - the plump softness of his lower lip feels bigger now he’s touching it, pillowy in a way that makes him want to bite down. He does, and Sirius snarls, bites him back, all those straight, white teeth pressing into the meat of his mouth. Remus feels the tiny crack at the front with his tongue. He can’t decide what he likes best - the sensation of closing his teeth around Sirius’ pink, squishy skin, the pained noise it elicits, or the sharp pricking of pain when Sirius does the same to him.

 

Sirius’ hands frame Remus’ face, the grip firm but not yet unkind. Remus pulls back - Sirius’s lips are shiny with spit, look red and swollen, and his stomach flips. “What else,” he breathes against Sirius’ mouth “is he angry about”.

 

Sirius raises one eyebrow, weirdly knowing, the same smug, self-assured cockiness that Remus has seen on that face so many times over the years. “Not here,” he says, “take me home first”. They walk the short distance to the farmhouse, somehow. Remus’ legs feel hollow and shaky, and he doesn’t dare speak - the tension between them is thick and warm, even breathing in it feels like a labour. As soon as they’re through the door Sirius is on him, fingers scrabbling in his short hair, kissing with what feels like the cumulative power of his whole body.

 

“You’re a coward” he growls, and it takes Remus a second to realise it’s an answer. Sirius pushes him back into a sitting position on the sofa, straddling his hips. He pulls his own shirt off and drops it behind himself without looking.

 

“You’re careless” Remus says, in answer, thinking of Sirius’ discarded laundry, his drunken declarations, his sometimes stunning lack of _thought._ Sirius grins down at him, grips his jaw in one large hand, tilts Remus’ chin up.

 

“You think you’re the only person who’s ever suffered” he spits, grinding his hips down, pushing their (clothed, why are they clothed?) cocks together. He releases Remus’ face, pulling his shirt up and over his head - Remus has to arch his back to let him, bringing them into contact again. Sirius’ eyes flutter momentarily before he steps back. Remus whines at the sudden lack of touch - Sirius smiles meanly at the noise and Remus flushes, embarrassed, feeling needy. He pulls off his own jeans, boxers, as Sirius does the same: he’s shamefully fascinated by the sight of Sirius’ hard cock standing against his belly, equal parts turned on and irritated by the flashy wink Sirius gives him when he catches him staring.

 

He kneels up on the sofa, leaning forward and catching a fistful of Sirius’ dark hair in his hand, pulling him forward roughly. It must hurt, but Sirius closes his eyes and grins like he likes it, leans into the arc of Remus’ arm as he maneuvers him onto the sofa. “You’re an arrogant bastard” he says, kissing him again, lips and teeth, iron-taste of blood.

 

“Fuck you, Moony,” he hisses, tongue running along his split bottom lip, “like it’s not arrogant to think you’re all unknowable and mysterious and shit. When actually you just love feeling sorry for yourse-” Sirius is cut off, caught off guard by the slap. It’s a clean, stinging thing - Remus’ palm tingles.

 

“Like the sound of your own voice, don’t you?” he asks Sirius in a low voice, reaching around to grip the muscled flesh of Sirius’ ass, digging his nails in, dragging, “You’re so desperate for attention. _Spit_ ”. He’s holding one hand in front of Sirius’ face - he looks down at Remus through his pretty eyelashes and obliges, a warm pool of saliva landing across his fingers, a strand connecting them enticingly to Sirius’ swollen lips. His eyes are very bright.

 

Sirius leans in, breathes hotly against Remus’ neck, bites down hard, a sucking, sharp pain, and says into his ear “Well, I always have yours. You sad little fuck, you’re always l _ooking_ at me and you never do a fucking thing about it, do you? Cause you - _oh_ -” Remus has reached his arm around Sirius, who is still perched in his lap, and is circling his rim with spit-slick fingers, never breaching, just massaging the puffy pink skin there, feeling how it would yield to him if he only applied a little more _pressure_.

 

After a second Sirius regains his train of thought, although his voice now is hitching and breathy, the blush in his cheeks spreading down his neck and chest, rosy nipples hard. Remus can see his ribs flexing as he shifts impatiently in his lap.  “Cause you feel so _sorry_ for yourself all the time, boo fucking hoo, nobody will ever fuck me cause I’m a werewolf and I hate myself, it’s so _boring_ …”.

 

It’s impressively mean and absolutely true. Remus whispers the nonverbal charm - the one every teenage wizard in Britain has down to a fine art by graduation - and his fingers are slick with lubricant. Sirius squirms against the sudden coolness but Remus doesn’t let up, gives no warning when he suddenly pushes his pointer finger into Sirius, meeting token resistance as Sirius’ body clenches and then relaxes around the intrusion. Sirius is bearing down on it, wriggling his hips, and Remus grins because he knows it’s not enough.

 

“You’re such a selfish bastard, Sirius” he says, almost sweetly, pistoning his finger with a sort of flicking motion in his wrist - Sirius is trying not to ask for more, he can tell, trying to keep the upper hand in a battle where the rules of combat are unclear. Remus leans up to kiss him instead, gets lost in it for a moment, the hot swiping massage of Sirius’ tongue, the tight squeezing as Sirius tenses his muscles around Remus’ finger. Remus has the tips of his ring and middle fingers pushed against the edge of Sirius’ hole, and Sirius is almost thrashing trying to push down onto them.

 

Finally, Remus takes pity, jabs them upwards, sharply and without warning. Sirius _yelps_ , sore and shocked, at the same time as he braces his hands on Remus’ shoulders, starts moving in earnest, fucking himself on Remus’ hand, tiny, breathy moans pulled from his chest, his eyes closed. Remus is achingly hard, can see that the tip of Sirius’ cock and the place where it slaps against his belly are wet with precome.

 

They’re quiet for a minute, only the sounds of their breathing, the creaking of the sofa, and the wet, fleshy sounds where Sirius is grinding down onto Remus’ slick fingers. When he pulls them out Sirius gasps, and when Remus says “I’m going to fuck you now” he nods, almost hysterically, borderline begging, his earlier pride undone, murmuring a nonsense stream of filth into the crook of Remus’ neck, where he’s slumped forward - “please, fuck, please, _please, Remus_ ”.

 

“You’re such a slut, Sirius” he says, rubbing the head of his cock against Sirius for a second before he pushes it in, maybe too fast, slick with lube. Sirius feels amazing, tight and hot, and he’s wriggling desperately. “Just because nobody’s ever loved you”.

 

Sirius throws back his head and moans. It’s an honest, embarrassing sound, and Remus’ hips jerk involuntarily upward. “I bet you love this, don’t you?” Sirius manages to breathe, “Giving it to one of your betters? You’ve got such a fucking chip on your shoulder, shame nobody would ever believe you…”

 

“I think they would” Remus growls, pumping his hips up into Sirius, matching Sirius’ own movement, the muscles in his strong thighs flexing as he digs his nails into Remus’ shoulders, “because everyone knows how desperate you are to be liked. You’d fuck anyone if it’d mean they’d look at you”. He’s getting so close now, wrapping one hand around Sirius’ cock - somehow, getting him off first feels like winning - and Sirius is whining, sounds like he’s almost crying, his hands pushing over Remus’ shoulders, his thumbs pushing into his neck on either side of his Adam’s apple.

 

Sirius manages - somewhat impressively - to gasp out “At least I’m not scared of being _seen._ ” as he comes, hot, warm pulsing over Remus’ fist, his chest, hands tightening where they rest at Remus’ neck as he does. With a growl Remus pushes up into Sirius, hard, hands on his slim hips, pulling him down onto his cock. Sirius doesn’t move his hands until Remus is coming inside him, vision greying and angry, adoring sparks tingling in his face, his neck.

 

Every part of him feels sore - he winces as Sirius climbs out of his lap, lays on his back on the sofa, a long, lean white canvas painted red with scratches, blooming purple with bruising. He’s somehow found a cigarette from _somewhere_ , and he’s taking a drag with almost comedic loucheness.

 

“Will you be here when I come back?” Remus asks, and Sirius shakes his head.

 

“One time deal, I’m afraid”.

 

Remus nods, disappointed, relieved, awash with shame. He can’t believe he did this - doesn’t even know what this Sirius-thing really _is_. He remembers being warned about the dangers of taking food from spirits, of becoming trapped in different realms. He wonders if this is better, or worse.

 

He murmurs the chant to end the dream, get back _home_.

 

“Remus,” Sirius says, and he turns to look into those uncanny, perfectly Sirius eyes. He starts counting down.

 

“What - _nigon, eahta, seofon_ ”

 

Sirius is saying something, but his words are drowned out by the faded, underwater sound of the white fog rolling in around him, the crossfade between dreaming and waking. Already he is only half here. _Seox, fif, fēoƿer_ , he counts. The familiar, unpleasant sensation of being in two places at once blooms within him, and by the time he’s down to _tƿeġen,_ _ān_ he’s in his own bed, eyes snapping open, sweaty body shivering in the cool air despite his clothes.

 

In the next room, he can hear Sirius shuffling about in his sleep, sound carrying through the open door.

 

For a long moment, he does nothing.


End file.
